The deadline is approaching – on 30 June 2012 Apple is closing down the MobileMe service, including any webpages you have published at homepage.mac.com.

Below are listed the steps I’ve figured out to allow you to move your whole homepage.mac.com website to another server and have it continue working as it has until now with the same designs and themes. This follows on from an earlier post – http://lisaandroger.com/2010/11/fixing-your-mac-homepage-sites/ describing how to keep them working after Apple made the Pictures folder go away. Hopefully the following steps are in time to help someone else:

Open your iDisk folder on your Mac. This will help you plan what needs to be done.

Contents of iDisk Folder

The content we are looking for is (mostly) in the Sites folder

Sites folder with highlights showing different files and folders

The yellow folders mostly show different “sites” that I had set up when publishing to homepage.mac.com, so homepage.mac.com was a different “site” from homepage.mac.com/BarHarbor and from homepage.mac.com/LisaInScotland. You’ll need a list of these to be able to retrieve all of the needed files and images in a later step.

The red files show different pages within the top level “site” – all of the pages linked in the menu at the top of the pages of this site – see http://LisaAndRoger.com/rogerkiwi/ – this loads the blue file shown above.

The blue files are the main index page for the site – index.html redirects to menu21.html to load the current index page.

There is also content that is not visible that is used, as well as content that is “outside” or “above” your site on Apple’s servers. We need to download all of these items as well.

First download the “main” homepage.mac.com/userID/ folder. The URL shows the main site, and the progress window shows how many files have been downloaded, how many files remain to be downloaded, and importantly reveals the “hidden” nature of many of these files – they’re in a folder called “.cv” which makes make that folder invisible.

I downloaded them to a folder on my Desktop called “homepage.mac.com Download” and after this run the contents of this folder look like this

The Initial Download from the .Mac root site

We can see that the various .html files have been downloaded, as well as a folder called “i” that contains most of the files needed for the various themes and slide shows showing on these pages – but it does not contain ALL of the needed files – we have to get them separately from the homepage.mac.com servers (see below).

Now if you had any other “sites” on your homepage.mac.com site as I mentioned above – the folders highlighted in yellow might be other “sub-sites” – eg homepage.mac.com/LisaInScotland/ – you need to download those sites as well.

SiteSucker working on one of the sub-sites

This image shows the hidden “.cv” folder and its contents being downloaded. These sub-sites are downloaded to the same folder as you chose for the first main site. The files are added to this folder.

Repeat these steps for all of the sub-sites you have as evidenced by the folders in the Sites folder from above.

There is (at least) one file that I discovered that you need to get directly from homepage.mac.com – the file “SlideShow.html” that is in the “i” folder that is “outside” of your homepage.mac.com page. So ask SiteSucker to get this file http://homepage.mac.com/i/hpti/1/wimg/Shared/SlideShow/SlideShow.html and it will download along with the other needed .js and theme files.

Now that you have retrieved all the files and folders needed, the next step is to edit some of these files to alter paths to files and to remove links to http://homepage.mac.com/ from them. Note that some of these files are hidden files, and some are in hidden folders:

First thing you need to do is determine what the URL to your “new” site will be – ie where you’re going to upload this to as some of the following steps require you to know the URL to these sites on your site. In my case I chose to create a folder “rogerkiwi” at the top level of my site http://LisaAndRoger.com/ to contain everything I saved from homepage.mac.com.

If you have an older site as I had for the main site that went back to 2002 or earlier, there are files called “.nav.homepage.js” that create the menu at the top of each page. For each of these files

TextWrangler Open Dialog showing hidden files and folders

you need to open them and edit all of the links.

This image shows one of these files opened in TextWrangler and one of the links highlighted.

Editing the .nav.homepage.js file in TextWrangler

I replaced the “http://homepage.mac.com/rogerkiwi/” with “http://LisaAndRoger.com/rogerkiwi/”. It seems this needs to be an absolute URL not a relative URL.

If you have other folders with a .nav.homepage.js file in them, edit those files too.

The HTML files that are in the Sites folder and in the folders in the Sites folder also contain hard links to your .Mac website in them. These need to be changed. Using TextWrangler’s Multi-File Search gets this job done easily.

TextWrangler Multi-File Search And Replace

I found that this needed to be replaced with an absolute URL – just making it relative prevented the slide show from working.

If like me, you had .Mac including a Web Counter on your pages, that doesn’t work and results in a broken image link icon. You can easily remove this with a grep find and replace in TextWrangler.

Using TextWrangler for a grep Find and Replace

finds the line containing the call for Counter.woa and removes it from all the files it appears in.

The bottom of all the pages contained an apple logo that linked to Mac.com – this now redirects to https://www.me.com/gallery/#home which is also going away. A TextWrangler find and replace will fix this too. Find all the occurrences of

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